Thyssen - Bornemisza Art Contemporary
dal 31/7/2006 al 30/10/2006
Segnalato da
31/7/2006
Thyssen - Bornemisza Art Contemporary
Art Pavillion, Venezia
Your black horizon, an installation by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and inaugurated in June 2005 as part of the 51st Venice Biennale of Visual Arts. It has recently been reopened, and will remain on public display until October 31, 2006.
Art Pavillion at Island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, Venice
Your black horizon, an installation by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and inaugurated in June 2005 as part of the 51st Venice Biennale of Visual Arts. It has recently been reopened, and will remain on public display until October 31, 2006.
Inside the Art Pavillion at Island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, Venice
In a windowless pavilion a thin horizontal line directed through a narrow gap at eye level serves as the primary light source. The light is constantly changing colors and rotates through the color spectrum every few minutes. The light installation was calibrated to the specific light conditions of Venice. While Your activity horizon tried to capture the northern light of Iceland, Your black horizon seizes the Mediterranean light of the laguna. Accurate light recordings have been taken from sunrise to sunset to study the spectrum of light and its intensity.
Your black horizon, a work commissioned from Olafur Eliasson for the Venice Biennale by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation is an example of the artist’s interest in the phenomenon of light, color, geometry, perception, movement, and space. It is placed in a temporary pavilion, whose form and appearance has been designed in close collaboration with the London based architect David Adjaye. It constitutes the final and most far-out point of Rosa Martinez’ finely choreographed exhibition, while also looking to the much larger manifestation of a horizon line, the zone of interference where heaven and earth meet .
Olafur Eliasson nudges the viewer into a perceptual awareness, as the pavilion is completely cleared out of any visual distractions leaving the pure intensity of the changing horizon line that surrounds. The distance that the viewers feel whenever he sees the line separating earth and heaven is foremost a temporal phenomenon by which one develops their own subjective imagination of space and time. Perception of time is realized through perception of space, and vice versa.
It is this point exactly where the titles of Eliasson’s works are effective, as they clearly address viewers and hint at the subjectivity of color and light perception. In Your black horizon the viewer is conscious of their own phenomenological status while experiencing contacts created by the light in its shift from architecture to viewer and its simultaneous demarcation of the pavilion’s frontiers.
By any means, the viewer becomes activated in an artistic process, which induces an awareness of one’s own presence and perception. As Eliasson states, "If the public gets involved in a stimulating situation, the situation 'commits itself' in return. There’s a reversal of subject and object here: the viewer becomes the object and the context becomes the subject. I always try to turn the viewer into what’s on show, make him mobile and dynamic."
In most instances, the artist and the architect have worked in isolation, each in their respective studio and therefore art making and space making for art have been independent activities. It is an exciting and a refreshing prospect that T-B A21 are renewing an ecclesiastical renaissance idea in which painting and sculpture and architecture share a preordained relationship with one another.
This project with Olafur Eliasson , the first T-B A21 collection pavilion at the Venice Biennale affords a unique opportunity in which the artist and architect share the same studio (albeit metaphorically) to engage, to respond to one another and to respond to the site specified for the pavilion. In a series of discussions, Olafur and I have envisioned the art and the space as an interlocking equation. As the artist and as the architect, T-B A21 has challenged us as practitioners to continue to review and redefine the boundaries of our own disciplines.
Opening: August 1, 2006
Art Pavillion - Isola di San Lazzaro degli Armeni (VE)
3pm-7pm daily or by prior appointment